How about a message inbox so we can chat w/ other steepster members. I think comments on tea logs should be about the tea, I’d rather not have my convo w/ someone in public and a lot of people don’t want to publicize their email address in a comment so the convo can be carried on via email.

What about searching for a steepster member by their location? Right now we can only search for people we know. This COULD be a great place to make and meet (physically, not just electronically) new tea drinking friends.

I was thinking a smaller version of meetup.com could be created here just for local tea gatherings. Until then, you could consider creating a local group on meetup.com in your area for tea outings and such. I have a group on there for psychic mediumship (I’m heavily into the paranormal, and think it pairs nicely with tea) :)

Any updates on the progress of this “connect” feature? It is a fabulous idea!
On my wish list for this feature would be the ability to create and manage tea tasting clubs. I know that this mimics meetup.com - but all the tea drinkers are here on Steepster!

@AmazonV: Hmm…we’ll think about that. The way we have our roadmap planned out is pretty complex – a round of significant feature development followed by a smaller round of misc. stuff so we can get the big things out of the way but also be cleaning up the smaller things too. That misc. bucket can changed pretty quickly too. The next big feature should be a fairly large technical challenge, but something we haven’t really seen used the way we plan to, so we might want to keep that under wraps for now.

There’s also a natural hesitation about establishing expectations in terms of what will be included and when. We have to balance all our Steepster work with other contracting gigs until Steepster can support us, so timing is always tricky to work out. Plus, we probably have different priorities than our individual users. We want to see Steepster continue to grow so it gets to a point where we can work full time on it and crank our awesome features like crazy. But if you’re an individual on the site, you might not immediately see the benefit of adding more users since there are already so many great ones. So your priorities would be focused more on getting specific new features right away…does that make sense?

However, with all that said, we do like being open with our community and getting valuable feedback from you, so it could be really helpful. It’s something we’ll definitely discuss again.

@Jason I can understand user expectations – I am an IT employee at a large multi-national and manage three software programs servers & deployments (btw know any friends w/.Net experience, two Senior .net spots open) and totally understand how fast things change, managing expectations etc.

However I also was the business analyst before I switched sides, having a small group (opt in etc) of users to help do UAT/feedback on the one next feature that is in the works and having them know there isn’t a timeline for deploy sometimes help iron some things out before they become snags or enable you to tweak them for useability

As people have mentioned the Dashboard page is exploding all over the place at the moment and I haven’t even dared go through what’s happened on mine since I checked last. I expect it’s going to even out as people get their Cupboards filled up, but at the moment it’s just ridiculous. Especially for people who are following a lot of other people. Such as ahem me. And especially especially if those are really active people.

I like how the Dashboard is loaded in bits, so it moves quicker and we don’t have to sit around and wait for ten thousand items of activity of some sort is being loaded all at once. On any average day, I guess I probably click view more some… I don’t know, I’ve never counted them. Let’s for the sake of the example say ten times. Nice round number and all that.

When I see that someone has commented on one of my posts or on a post that I have commented on previously, I go and look right away. Same if I want to comment on someone else’s posts. I can’t look through all the new updates and then go back and check because then I’d forget half of the things I wanted to see. When I’m done with that I hit the back button to go back to the Dashboard page.

I’m getting to the point now. This is the point.

The Dashboard page can’t remember how far I got. If I was clicking a link on say for example page 7, I first have to scroll through pages 1-6 AGAIN to get to the place I had got to. It would be really awesome if the Dashboard page could remember where I had got to so I could skip all the scrolling through stuff I had already seen. Depending on how many things you click on while checking the newest activity you can end up with a seriously huge amount of scrolling.

I don’t know if this is possible, but if it is, it would definitely save me a lot of time.

That sounds like some really complex logic that would be pretty taxing on the system (making it load slower) but the new organization of the dashboard that we’re already working on should help with these concerns.

Speaking of Tabs on the Dashboard, I would really appreciate one that allows me to track the discussions I already participate in. I will still use the main ‘Discussions’ button at the top to see what everyone is dishing about, but I would like to keep closer track of the chats I’m most interested in.
As usual, thanks for asking!

JustDuckyInNE, you have the notices notifying you of new posts (and are linked directly to them) and the fact that the threads turn blue, what else are you looking for? I’m not trying to sound rude, just trying to understand.

I’d want to see tasting notes being sorted by date. I mean if you look at someone’s notes for a particular tea, they are all mixed up, there is no chronological order at all. It would be interesting and useful to see how opinions change with time and more profound tasting.
I hope I’m making sense here :)

You can actually do this already if you go to the user’s tealog. On their tealog, you can sort by “New” (which is the default setting). You can use this to see a person’s taste develop over time and see how their tastes have changed. However, it is not setup like this on the tea page.

On the tea page (which is what I think you’re referring to) a person’s tasting notes for that tea are sorted by popularity. We think this is most appropriate for the location because when you are on the tea page you want to find the best/most relevant tasting notes for that tea (and we’re planning to add features to help better surface the best tasting notes). But if you want to see a person’s development over time, we think that is best shown on the person’s tealog (which is where it is now). I hope that makes sense :)

I’d like to see a “Tasting Notes Requested” section. There are a lot of teas I’ve seen on the shelf or on the web and wonder about them, but I haven’t seen anyone taste them yet. We could post “Anyone try Murchie’s Golden Jubilee?” and see if anyone responds.

I like how this site is growing! To add my two cents’ worth, I think it would be nice to have a “reply” function in our entries too, so we can respond to people individually. As some others have already mentioned, email notifications would be nice, like when someone comments on your entry/replies to your comments and when someone “likes” your stuff …

You can post a reply to a post rather than to the entire topic, but how about the ability to reply to a reply? That way people know exactly who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about. Also, how about a way to quote a portion of the post we’re replying to. This is the very reason I posted all of my ideas separately. I figured it was a toss up between what some people may call spam and jumbling up the board. Neither are good.

I’d like to be able to somehow note or categorize my cupboard for their location. I have a set of teas at home and a set in the office, and it would be nice to be able to look up just what I have in one location and see if I need to move stuff around or purchase new stuff.